Aww, no alien empires yet

[chris0033547]

After they've spread enough, and hardened themselves against cosmic existential threats, you've got to wonder what the point is in growing larger and larger across a galaxy. All they would be doing is more of the same.

One idea for continuous expansion might be to prolong their own existence into the distant future. They might turn the rest of the galaxy and eventually even neighboring galaxies into efficient "storage units" for hydrogen. Look at our sun for example. Most of its fuel is wasted, because humanity utilises only a tiny amount of it for its energy needs. And we are only able to utilize it in an indirect way through the generation of electricity from sunlight. That's wasteful. A highly advanced civilisation would be able to use grazers in order to disassemble whole stars and store their hydrogen in a more efficient manner for later usage. They could then access this hydrogen from time to time and create red dwarfs or utilize the hydrogen in other ways and so on. The end result might be something like the Leviathan:

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4802acd634205

The question is, why all of this galaxy-level engineering didn't already happen and the universe around us is so "wasteful"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_supergiant

Because of their extreme masses they have relatively short lifespans

There is of course a possibility that all civilisations eventually create their own basement universes perhaps even with different cosmological constants, which are more suitable for computation and escape from this "inefficient" universe. This way they would also be able to avoid contact with equally advanced alien civilisations, which might be risky for both civilisations and might change their social structures in unpredictable ways. Why share the universe with other intelligent life, if you can create a whole universe just for yourself, where you alone would be the one and only lifeform?

EDIT: The Triangulum Civilisation might have done something like this in order to escape from the Leviathan. Before the Leviathan reached them, they might have been able to create a basement universe and gradually move there. At some point they could "cut the link" (destroy the intra-universal wormhole) and thus escape from the Leviathan.